![]() The RIVA TNT had many things going for it when compared to the Voodoo 2. This technology would later be purchased and used by NVIDIA. It also had a revolutionary feature called Scan-Life Interleave (SLI), which allowed two Voodoo 2 cards to be installed into a system in order to boost performance. As with the original Voodoo, the Voodoo 2 required you to have a 2D card. It supported higher resolutions than its Voodoo 1 competition but poor driver support meant it couldn’t perform to the same standard.ģDfx’s sophomore 3D accelerator supported a maximum resolution of 800 × 600 and cemented their top spot in the 3D market. Short for Real-time Interactive Video and Animation, the RIVA 128 was one of the first AGP video cards and introduced many consumers to the NVIDIA name. For 3D tasks, the Voodoo graphics accelerator greatly outperformed its competition and established 3Dfx’s dominance in the 3D accelerator market. Overall, it was a decent 2D card but a poor 3D performer.Ī 3D-only graphics accelerator, the Voodoo 1 required you to have a separate video card for 2D graphics. Like the NVIDIA NV1, it had some issues with DirectX compatibility. The NV1 utilized a 3D rendering process that was not supported by DirectX 1.0 and as a result, many games could not run on the card.ĪTI’s very first 3D accelerator, the Rage 1 was capable of handling both 2D tasks as well. NVIDIA’s first product was a combination 2D and 3D graphics accelerator that was unfortunately doomed by the release of DirectX 1.0 a few short months later. It also contained a parallel printer port so that users did not have to add another card for printer connectivity. Those in turn were contained in a 9 × 14 pixel box, so the display had a “resolution” of 720 × 350 pixels. Said to be the first video card ever, it displayed 80 columns × 25 lines of text and symbols. Resolutions were also quite small, with SVGA (800 × 600) introduced late in the decade. The first consumer video cards appeared in the mid-‘80s and primarily tackled 2D workloads rather than 3D. 1980s – The Early Days of Consumer Video Cards From pre-VGA to 4K, we cover the most important video cards of the past thirty five years. Since that time, improvements to manufacturing processes have shrunk die sizes from 200+ nanometers (nm) in the ‘90s down to just 28 nm today. Video cards have come a long way in a relatively short period, with the first units in the early ‘80s only capable of displaying eight colors.
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